WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Bipartisanship is alive and well. You just have to go to the coal mines to find it.

So two coal-state senators, George Voinovich of Ohio and John Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, teamed up this morning to announce once again that there is no way the Senate can get 60 votes to pass a climate-change bill that would start restricting carbon emissions.

They said they have a better idea, anyway: Have the government offer $20 billion over the next decade for continued development of affordable carbon capture-and-sequestration technology. And offer tax credits to utilities that use that technology.

That's simply another way of saying that carbon from coal can be captured and pumped underground, where it could be stored. It is the only way the United States will ever get all the electricity it needs and still reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the senators said in a telephone news conference. Utilities and consumers would have to pay for the research, but the cost would be less than $10 a year per household, Voinovich said.

Their idea is not new, and carbon capture experiments are being conducted in West Virginia and Illinois, among other places. But the cost has been too high for utility companies to adopt it, said Voinovich, a Republican, and Rockefeller, a Democrat.

A bill they formally announced today, but under discussion for months, would provide the financial cushion to help the Department of Energy, research laboratories and coal-burning utilities jump-start clean-coal technology, the senators said. The bill would "buy down" the prohibitive cost of developing carbon capture-and-sequestration methods that are not yet commercially viable, Voinovich said.

"It's the only future that coal can have," Rockefeller said. And without coal, he added, the nation will starve for electricity. That's a fact he said some of his Senate colleagues refuse to understand. When talking of the costs for the research, Rockefeller said, "That's a dollar a month to have a future."

This will take time, the senators said, and will not meet the carbon-reduction deadlines called for in a climate-change bill by John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent. But it should have been done eight years ago, they said.

"It won't all be there in 2020, as in Kerry's bill," Rockefeller said. "It may take until 2030. But it's a very good trade-off to running out of electricity."

Regardless, the Kerry-Lieberman bill cannot pass, the two said. It'll take 60 votes to end debate on it, and Senate Democrats lack that kind of support for their measure. A slimmed-down energy bill that doesn't cap carbon has a chance as a compromise, they said, and they could see their clean-coal measure getting merged into it.

The opposition from these coal-state senators should surprise no one. Both voiced their opinions as the Kerry-Lieberman bill developed, just as they opposed a somewhat more restrictive bill by Democratic Reps. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Henry Waxman of California when it passed the House last year.

"I certainly cannot support the Kerry Lieberman bill," Voinovich reiterated today. "Quite frankly, it's just the Markey-Waxman bill, just in another set of clothes."